Creation of PC Gaming Alliance leaves unanswered questions

The PC Gaming Alliance wants to be the power players in hardware and software …

The rumor started before GDC: there would be a group of companies coming together to help promote gaming on the PC, and it would include such industry heavyweights as Microsoft, Intel, and NVIDIA. Today at GDC, during a nondescript press conference labeled only "PC Gaming Announcement," the PC Gaming Alliance was officially announced. It includes not only the three companies previously reported, but also Epic, AMD, Acer, Activision, Razer, and Dell. What the group has in power, it lacks in branding. "Logos are expensive," joked Intel's Randy Stude, who's now the PCGA president.

The PCGA sees a number of problems with the state of PC gaming: consumers that are confused about hardware and software requirements, the absence of any consistent source of information, the lack of a unified voice to champion PC gaming, and massive massive piracy that offsets a lot of the industry's growth. The group hopes to use its members' considerable power in the industry to change this situation. "Working together, we have an exponentially greater opportunity to propel the PC gaming experience to new heights," said Kevin Ungaust, the senior global director of Games for Windows at Microsoft.

Ars Technica asked what steps would taken to make the group real in terms of action, and the answer was less than inspiring. "We had our first group meeting last year at GDC... I believe in picking things you can focus on and get done, like bringing the group together, getting our 501c filed, and getting a call out to members to join to help mold the future of PC gaming. That's why we're here today," Intel's Stude told us. "The two things I've highlighted today are what it takes to play games on the PC, and then how big is PC gaming."

Having executives from Microsoft, Dell, Nvidia, Epic, and Intel speaking about various ways to promote gaming lead to some rather interesting observations, as they clearly have divergent agendas. Epic's Mark Rein once again railed against integrated graphics, while noting that the price of NVIDIA's 8800 line of graphics cards continues to drop in price, leading Intel's Stude to look uncomfortable, while a smile crept across the face of Nvidia's Roy Taylor. A question about whether or not Vista or XP would be pushed at the OS of choice for gaming also lead to a few uncomfortable moments, with Microsoft's Ungaust claiming that Vista is a success while noting the similar growing pains of XP.

It was also emphasized that the group had no plans to push for digital distribution. "Why would we stop buying shrinkwrapped games?" Rein asked; he also praised Best Buy and Wal-Mart's support of PC gaming.

"This isn't going to be the RIAA," Stude said when the issue of piracy was brought up, but it's not clear what the PCGA is going to be. The group wants to promote the open format of the PC, but seems unwilling to create any sort of minimum standard for hardware that would allow consumers to be confident about its gaming performance.

While the group seems to have a solid grasp of what's wrong with PC gaming, it didn't put forth any compelling ideas about what to do about them. It's also unclear why consumers should trust a group composed of members that have much to gain by presenting only certain kinds of information. While many would argue that XP is, at the moment, the better OS for gaming, would Microsoft allow the PCGA to say so?

As the meeting broke up, there seemed to be many misgivings about the group, primarily focused on the fact that no one was sure what it would actually do. Everyone agreed that the issues the PCGA discussed were real but, without a strong roadmap detailing what the PCGA hopes to accomplish, the group may simply become a quagmire of differing goals and ideas about what PC gaming should be and how to best serve its needs.